On June 2, 2008 (one week ago) the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of Major League Baseball Advanced Media v. C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing, Inc (2007) 505 F.3d 818. ((8th Cir.(Mo.) Oct 16, 2007)), the Fantasy Sports case. To backtrack a bit; for those who are unfamiliar, Fantasy Sports (or rotisserie and many other names), is the pursuit where players “select” teams of players from real sports teams and compete against other fantasy sports players based upon the statistics compiled by the players they have selected, Wikipedia Definition here.

Fantasy sports have evolved over the . . . [more]

Following along from last month’s exchanges at the Writers’ Union, a couple of interesting speculative pieces on what technology will do to book publishing and to libraries.

The Economist has a piece this week from Book Expo America on Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry
. I liked the last line, which echoes what I said to the Writers’ Union:

Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.

But . . . [more]

“Draft it yourself,” that is, using the wiki set up for that purpose by McGill University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy (cipp).

It’s interesting to see the points made by the cipp folks to try to get the wiki to work for such a serious and exacting project:

• Like any wiki, justify your comments, add links, etc.
• Let’s be serious. If we want this to be an alternative piece of legislation, we have to be balanced. (David Lametti, for example, would personally like to see copyright’s term reduced radically and the re-imposition of a registration requirement, but he appreciates that

Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, tabled her 2007 Annual Report in Parliament yesterday:

“The year 2007 will no doubt be remembered in the privacy world as the year of the data breach.”

“The size of some of the data spills reported around the globe was staggering: An estimated 94 million credit and debit cards were exposed when hackers broke into the system at TJX Companies Inc., the U.S. retail giant which owns Winners and HomeSense stores in Canada. In the United Kingdom, two computer discs holding the personal details of some 25 million child benefit recipients vanished. ”

The Attorney General of Ontario Chris Bentley announced yesterday that his department is setting targets to reduce court delays and appearances by 30 per cent in routine criminal cases over the next four years.

“To ensure transparency and accountability, the province is also making available criminal court statistics to the public for the first time.”

To meet the targets, the province will be expanding 2 initiatives:

• Dedicated Prosecution: “Under Dedicated Prosecution, small tight-knit teams of Crown prosecutors and support staff are given ownership of cases from the beginning of the court process until the case is resolved, or until

The Precedent Blog reports that four University of Ottawa law students have filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada over alleged poor privacy practices by social networking site Facebook. The students are working with The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa. On May 30th CIPPIC filed a 35-page complaint under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) against Facebook, alleging 22 separate violations of the Act.

According to the Press Release from CIPPIC:

A team of law students, some of whom are dedicated Facebook users,

There’s a good little piece from Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP on the legal state of play when it comes to taking your laptops and PDAs across the U.S.-Canada border. “Electronic Devices and Borders – A Privacy-Free Zone?” by Edmonton Associate Dana Bissoondatt cites chapter and verse and mentions as well that Canada has taken up the practice of peeping, it seems.

We’ve broached this topic before on Slaw in
Laptops and Cross-Border Security, and
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Resources. . . . [more]

Following up on Simon’s post last week and a supplementary comment by David Fraser concerning that international agreement on Anti-counterfeiting under negotiation that would permit ex parte searches for allegedly infringing materials. This raises the spectre of customs and border enforcement authorities searching laptops, ipods and other electronic devices.

All of the relevant technical discussion has been usefully gathered here.

I think the answer is to just give up travelling. . . . [more]

Section 1 starts: . . . [more]

Those of you who have cases that seem to have dragged on forever may find the Internet Medieval Source Book‘s pages on medieval law useful and interesting. A project of Fordham University, the main medieval law links page will give you a tour d’horizon of Roman, Canon, Germanic, English, Jewish, Islamic law texts. This is a fairly comprehensive collection of resources. . . . [more]

Just when you thought that the whole craziness of IP couldn’t get any more strange… along comes VueStar Technologies, a Singaporean company that claims a patent on using images to link to a webpage. It seems the company does have Singapore Patent No. 95940 and on that basis is sending bills to firms in Singapore for an annual license of their patent. According to the story in ZDNet Asia, the VueStar has also received a patent in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. A very quick search for VueStar in the Canadian patent database didn’t get a hit. . . . [more]

A 2007 discussion paper mooting a proposed “plurilateral” Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, to bind Canada, the U.S., Japan, and European nations among others, has been making the rounds of various websites lately. Leaked last week by the interesting WikiLeaks, you can read the document here [PDF].

Quite apart from anything else, the role proposed to be given to border guards seems problematic.

[And while I’m here, why “plurilateral,” a word that hasn’t yet made it to the online OED? What was wrong with “multilateral”?] . . . [more]